Carlos Amorales & Javier Viver – video installations at Location One, New York.

In the Main Gallery, “Manimal” by Carlos Amorales, a black and white video animation (2005, 6 minutes). Reminiscent of a tale from the Middle Ages, in this animation narrative a pack of wolves emigrates from the forest into the city, substituting, as they overtake the streets, its human population. The piece was made by combining 3D animation tools with flat two dimensional drawings of silhouettes, in a form that looks like a shadow theatre happening in a virtual environment. The music, an orchestral slow tempo heavy metal sound, keeps in tension the narrative suggested by the drawings; the story of the wolves becomes a dark epic. Manimal is about the transformation of animal emotions into human rationality, it is about how, when the moon disappears, the werewolf returns to people’s normality.

In the South Gallery an installation by Javier Viver “The Audience”, (2005, video and theater chairs, 4.5 minutes). The three video channels are projected on contiguous panels while the viewer sits on red theater chairs that are constantly lit. Viver draws an analogy with The Big Theater of the World (El Gran Teatro del Mundo) a masterpiece written by Calderón de la Barca during the Spanish Golden Age. In the video we can see the last minutes of an opera performance: each singer bows and receives the deserved applause from the audience, but the audience is missing. We can hear the clapping, but we can not see where it comes from. The minimalist monotony of the empty theater is broken by three mysterious eyes looking around. Could this be the eye that sees everything?
Javier Viver’s installation is supported in part by Consulate General of Spain in New York.
Carlos Amorales is represented by the Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York and Paris.
Theater seats kindly provided by Poltrona Frau USA.